Xerox Logo and Brand Makeover

Xerox unveiled a new logo in what it claims is the most sweeping transformation of its corporate identity. Earlier in 1961, it had dropped “Haloid” from the Haloid Xerox name. The old logo was designed in the 1960s by Chermayeff & Geismar. This logo (the familiar block-capital-letter XEROX wordmark) has been considered largely inappropriate for the 3-D world of Internet and mobile-phone marketing canvases.

The new logo, created by Interbrand in FS Albert font, (xerox in small lower case letters) is accompanied by a red sphere, a small globe with intersecting graphic ribbons. The globe and the ribbons depict the global connections between Xerox's customers, employees, and other stakeholders. While the red color stays (people strongly associate with color red), the lower case font seemed much friendlier say company officials. Interbrand believes the new logo brand communicates innovation, forward thinking, flexibility, and enterprise. Interbrand will track consumer behavior toward Xerox and its products and communications in interviews, surveys, and focus groups to assess the impact of the new brand identity and mainly ROI on the new brand strategy.

Xerox brand strategy to unveil a new brand logo can be a great start to bring together or uniting employees around a new brand idea, and ultimately its customers. Long gone are the days when Xerox was associated mainly for its copiers. Xerox does not even make stand-alone copiers any more. Xerox has introduced 100 new products in the last three years. Xerox makes machines that both print and copy and is also into managing a company’s document flow services.

Wal-Mart stops Movie Download Service

Wal-Mart's online video downloading service which began in February has been quietly canceled, less than a year after the site went live. Wal-Mart was the first major retailer to partner with all of the major Hollywood movie studios and TV networks to offer downloads the same day titles were released on DVD.

Hewlett Packard which provided the technology that powered this service decided to discontinue its services because the market for paid video downloads did not perform that well.

Toyota overtakes Ford Sales

Ford has been second in sales to General Motors (GM) since 1931. But, for the first time since then (in 77 years) Ford Motors is not the second largest automaker in the U.S.. The 2007 sales figures put Japanese Toyota in the number two place. Ford's sales dropped 12.0% in 2007 to 2.57 million units sold. Toyota sold 2.62 million vehicles in 2007. This figure is 48,226 more that Ford. The Japanese automaker's sales were up 3.0%. This figure is boosted by the new Toyota Tundra pickup, which had a sales increase of 57.0%.

Restructuring at IBM

IBM in big Restructuring move

In what is being said is the biggest realignment/restructuring in 15 years, IBM Corp. is restructuring its hardware division around customer types as compared to individual products. William Zeitler, head of IBM's hardware division said the restructuring changes would strengthen IBM's ability to sell technology to small and medium-sized businesses and to design products specifically for them.

IBM Restructuring Strategy - New Segments in Hardware Group

The realignment/restructuring at IBM will create four client segments:

1. Hardware for large organizations
2. Small and mid-sized customers
3. Industry systems in retail, telecommunications and health care, and
4. Microelectronics, serving buyers of IBM's custom microprocessors.

IBM will still report hardware revenue by product category.